My blog was without an ‘LMS isn’t dead’ post, so I thought I’d write one.

Back in November 2007, Martin Weller, a Professor at the Open University wrote that, in his opinion, the VLE/LMS is dead – “but we’ll probably take five years to realise it”. It’s been almost a decade since his post, and there has been plenty more written about the LMS. In fact, Google returns almost 20,000 results for the search term “LMS is dead”, and just recently Jim Groom wrote a widely-shared and commented-upon post about it.

Yet, it seems, the truth is that the LMS is not going away anytime soon. Why is that? Why have the alternative solutions mentioned in Martin’s post withered and died while the LMS lives on? Why would anyone in 2017 use an LMS? Curiously, the answers are right there in the post from 10 years ago:

Authentication

Convenience

Support

Reliability

Monitoring

Meanwhile, the reasons Martin gives in that post for moving away from an LMS have largely been negated by developments over the last ten years. Here’s his original list of the benefits of using a ‘small pieces, loosely joined’ approach instead of an LMS:

Better quality tools

Modern look and feel

Appropriate tools

Cost

Avoids software sedimentation

Disintermediation happens

Back when he wrote this post, I would have agreed with all of Martin’s points, envisioning a future filled with users merrily skipping between platforms into the sunset. I’ve learned a lot since then, and it’s pretty clear that a ‘small pieces, loosely joined’ is unlikely to ever happen. The LMS market is growing, not shrinking.

My reason for thinking about all this is because I’ve just started doing some work with Totara, an organisation I first came across back in 2012 when they built the Open Badges functionality for Moodle. Since then, while their code remains open source, they’ve ‘forked’ from the Moodle codebase. They’ve also got Totara Social, an ‘enterprise social network’ platform.

Interestingly, Totara are in the process of removing ‘LMS’ from their branding. That doesn’t mean that the concept of the learning management system is dead. No. What’s happening here is that the term ‘LMS’ has become a ‘dead metaphor’. It no longer does any useful work.

The problem is that people will, either purposely or naïvely, use human-invented terms in ‘incorrect’ ways. This can lead to exciting new avenues, but it also spells the eventual death of the original term as it loses all explanatory power. A dead metaphor, as Richard Rorty says, is only good as the ‘coral reef’ on which to build other terms.

A learning management system, in essence, is a digital space to support learning. It doesn’t particularly matter what you call it so long as it:

Has the functionality you require

Costs what you can afford

Is reliable

The reason I’ve accepted this piece of work with Totara is because they tick all of my boxes around their approach to this space. They’re innovative. They’re open source. They’ve got a sustainable business model. I’m looking forward to helping them with developing a workable vision and strategy around their community that fits with their pretty unique partner network approach.

As regular readers will be aware, and as betrayed by the introduction to this post, my background is in formal and informal learning. The Learning & Development (L&D) space is relatively new to me, so if you’ve got tips on people to follow, places to hang out, and things to read, please do let me know!